10 comments

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  oraclebase

  1 year ago

  I do everything on the internet or on VMs. If I lost my laptop tomorrow I could be back online in the amount of time it takes to buy the new laptop, install VMware Server and copy over the VMs.
  
  If you can get into the habit of doing this it makes life very easy. :)
  
  Cheers
  
  Tim...
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  Jake

  1 year ago

  Excellent advice. I use VirtualBox because it's free as in beer. This will be a chance for me to get closer to that ideal; all my files are on a USB drive, so now all I need is an XP image.
  
  It's funny how much faith we put in hard drives. Moving parts fail. I can't wait for solid state to be everywhere.
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• 

  assaf

  1 year ago

  I use XP exclusively in VM (VMWare on Linux, Parallels on the Mac). XP itself drives me crazy, but the VM experience itself is positive.
  
  Only problems I ran into: you spend more HD on two OS + apps, you can't run very memory intensive apps on both OS at once, and there's no support for accelerated graphics. But for the occasional IE/Office use, neither one bothered me.
  
  On the other hand, now I have a pristine XP setup that I never have to worry about. You can mount your XP home folder onto the host OS, then every few months, when XP bloats itself to unbearable slowness or wrecks the registry, you can just start over from a clean image.
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  Jake

  1 year ago

  Good point, reimaging a VM isn't as big a deal as reimaging a disk. I don't have the horses to run very much in a VM, maybe IE or Office, for a short amount of time, but not both.
  
  I'm more concerned with the amount of time starting over will take. I'm a lazy man.
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  davidhaimes

  1 year ago

  I have had many, many problems with my Dell laptop running XP, at the moment it works but not in the docking station - so I don't use the docking station. I would ask desktp support to look at it, but to be honest I'll just take a machine that works. I try to plan for the certainty that I may lose a hard drive or need to reimage at any point in time, I store nothing on my hard drive backing up my bookmarks and ppts on a USB drive regularly.
  
  As for computers that I get to choose, I have macs, powerbooks, imacs and even the short lived Mac Cube. I also have an XO laptop - which is pretty neat but the keys are designed for kids so that has ot go to my Son.
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  Jake

  1 year ago

  Yeah, I've heard a lot of stories about iterative issues with those laptops. I guess if you have a current backup it's only a minor annoyance.
  
  I downloaded the .iso file and burned it to DVD, so I'm getting closer.
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  assaf

  1 year ago

  My experience switching from XP to Linux was about a day to get everything over, a couple of weeks to fully settle.
  
  The installation process is different from Windows, you can apt-get most of the stuff and just let it run in the background for a few hours. You won't be spending the day clicking through wizards and waiting on progress bar.
  
  But to get really settled I had to configure it to my personal style, and that you can only learn from using it daily, so it took a couple of weeks to really settle in.
  
  I set up dual boot just in case, but by the end of the first day I got enough setup on Linux that I never rebooted to XP.
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  Jake

  1 year ago

  Too true, I've tried to switch to Linux as my primary O/S for years, but I always kept my primary O/S as Windows. All this did was emphasize how lazy I really am.
  
  So, you're right; you have to switch fully to make it stick, which is what I'm planning to do.
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  megbear

  1 year ago

  I don' t think it's superstition but laziness. It honestly never occurred to me to install a new version of IE (or to switch my default browser to firefox). Mostly for the reason that nothing ever prompted me to do that. I don't want to fiddle with my computer, I just want it to work. That is why I think the mac is so superior. It doesn't leave it to me, it keeps "suggesting" that I upgrade, and so I do. Problem solved.
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  Jake

  1 year ago

  Well Windows suggests you upgrade too, and if you listened, you'd be using IE7 by now. If you listened to IT, you would still be running IE6.
  
  The question is would you listen if a web app told you to change to a different browser, probably not.
  reply